Productivity and completion session

In May we met for a different kind of session – a productivity and completion meeting, aimed at developing and finishing ideas that had already been started on, either at previous sessions of The Game Kitchen or elsewhere. We had three existing game designs to work on, and as well as those designers there were plenty of generous spare people who’d come along to help and to playtest!

The Conversation

Laura and Bez brought along a playtest version of this two-player game, which was started off at The Game Kitchen back in 2015 when it was known as The Argument. They managed to get seven full tests completed! Players draw characters from a deck and have a conversation – either an Argument, and Affirmation, a Beginning or an Ending. It seems now to be not too far off being publishable.

Life of a House

Ruth, Will and Mo worked on this much more recent larp, from our February 2017 session a few months ago. The main design of the actual play of the larp was already in place, but there was some useful discussion around the workshops and inter-escene interludes – as well as thoughts about lighting, sound, and set dressing, inspired by Will’s talk in April about theatre tech. Life of a House should be ready for playtest during the summer, ahead of a possible run at Consequences in November 2017.

Asking for it

Finally Laura and Mo did some brief finishing-off design work on this new two-player larp about domestic abuse, prior to playtesting it twice. One thing which became apparent is that it really does need proper debrief and decompression time… we had to end the second playtest briskly for time reasons, and it left the players feeling quite unsettled. The designers’ hope is that Asking for it will be adaptable to educational purposes, although this current version is aimed at existing larpers.